Community High School (CHS) is a public, magnet high school serving grades 9–12 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the United States. Located on a site at 401 North Division Street near the city's Kerrytown district, CHS today enrolls approximately 450 students.
Established in 1972, CHS was one of the first public magnet schools in the country, offering students a smaller alternative to the city's three large comprehensive high schools. It is one of the few surviving institutions among the wave of experimental high schools that were founded across the United States in the 1970s.
Unlike many public alternative schools in other cities, CHS is not restricted to a particular student population (such as "gifted" or "underachieving" students), nor does it explicitly emphasize one particular area of study over others. Founded on an experimental "school-without-walls" concept, CHS continues to offer opportunities to interact with the surrounding community, primarily through its open campus and its , an avenue for students to design their own courses for credit through experiential learning projects in the Ann Arbor area. In contrast to many traditional high schools, CHS has been known for its small size, its open campus and down to earth student participation in school governance and staff hiring, and loose attendance policies more similar to those of colleges than those at most high schools. The school has also eschewed many of the characteristics of traditional high schools, including interscholastic sports programs, valedictorians, dress codes, detention, hall passes, changing bells, mascots (aside from a rainbow-spangled zebra).
Early history By the early 1970s, Ann Arbor had developed a reputation as one of the most liberal campus towns in the country. The city played host to numerous radical political organizations, eventually electing three members of the left-wing Human Rights Party to its city council. Meanwhile, the teenage group Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor was carving out a role as a national pioneer in the nascent youth rights movement,Beatrice Gross and Ronald Gross, eds., The Children's Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Young People (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), 130. with fifteen-year-old member Sonia Yaco's insurgent school-board candidacy earning her 1,300 write-in votes, or eight percent of the total, in spring 1972.Mike Mosher, "Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor: Young, Gifted and Media-Savvy" , Bad Subjects, no. 47 (January 2000), accessed 22 February 2008. Reflecting this non-traditional ethos, the city's school district opened two experimental alternative schools during those years: Earthworks (originally Pioneer II) in fall 1971, and Community High School (CHS) in fall 1972.
The Community High idea, according to the 1972 blueprint, was to use the city as classroom – thereby creating a "school without walls" where students could develop their own curricula by drawing on experiences and resource people throughout the community."High School to use city as classroom," Ann Arbor News, 16 August 1972. Although the concept was new to Ann Arbor, planners took inspiration from similar innovative programs then springing up in other cities, including the Chicago High School for Metropolitan Studies (est. 1969), Philadelphia's Parkway High School, and Washington, D.C.'s School Without Walls (est. 1971). Reflecting the liberal educational philosophy of the period, other goals in the early CHS proposals were "to provide an opportunity for a heterogeneous group of students and faculty to learn and work together and to combat prejudices based on race, sex, age, lifestyle, and school achievement," and "to foster the development of identity and responsibility.""How new Community High School will be organized," Ann Arbor News, 2 April 1972. The plan emphasized placing students of all grades in the same classes and programs, and had at its heart the Community Resources Program and the Forum Program, small units of students integrated by age, sex and race which would provide home bases for counseling and cultural-studies work."Community High School plan includes new 'forum' concept," Ann Arbor News, 16 April 1972. For a more recent description of the Forum program, see Larry Abramson, "Alternative 'Commie' High Mellows with Time," report on National Public Radio, All Things Considered, 14 February 2008.
CHS opened in September 1972, after a $100,000 renovation to an empty downtown building (constructed in 1925) that had formerly housed Jones Elementary School, a majority African-American school which was closed in 1965 due to re-districting for racial-desegregation purposes."Jones building OK'd for new high school," Ann Arbor News, 20 April 1972. Although members of the school board proposed naming classrooms after Ann Arborites who had been killed in the Vietnam War, these plans angered local citizens and teachers who opposed the war, and were never implemented."School room naming debated," Ann Arbor News, 3 August 1972.
The school's first dean, Dean Bodley, told the Ann Arbor News that the school's only formal rules would be two safety precautions: "no smoking except in the student-teacher lounge and persons must wear shoes" – although even these were quickly abandoned. The first commencement, held at the nearby St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, banished caps and gowns, valedictorians and salutorians of traditional graduation ceremonies.Pat Bauer, "Commencement to shun tradition," Ann Arbor News, 6 June 1973. See also June Kronholz, "Class Issue: At many U.S. schools, the valedictorian is now a tricky question," The Wall Street Journal, 17 May 1999, p. A1. The community-based education concept flourished during CHS's first several years, with students developing 569 Community Resource courses in the Ann Arbor community during the fall of 1974 alone.Jody Vellucci, "Resource Program results mixed," Ann Arbor News, 28 January 1973; "Community High: A First?," Ann Arbor News, 24 October 1974. Within the school itself, unorthodox course offerings included subjects as diverse as dream analysis and Eastern philosophy. A 1974 analysis of the school by University of Michigan researchers noted that "[o]verall autonomy in CHS is high", and concluded that "CHS is an organization dedicated to the development of humanistic principles... 'Maximum individuality within maximum community' could well be its banner."Linda Banks et al., "Agency Study: Community High School," University of Michigan School of Social Work report, 12 December 1974, p. 1, quoted in OECD Programme on Educational Building, Building for School and Community, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: OECD Publications Center, 1978), p. 130.
Through the 1970s, enrollment remained in the high 300s. Dr. R. Wiley Brownlee, a civil-rights activist and former principal of Willow Run High School in Michigan, became CHS dean in the school's second year. In his time at Willow Run High, Brownlee had taken a conciliatory approach to mounting racial tensions at the school, an approach that eventually cost him his job. His insistence on fair treatment for minority students had also propelled him into national headlines when, in 1971, he was assaulted at gunpoint, then tarred and feathered, by members of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan following a Willow Run school-board meeting."Rights activist Brownlee dies," Lansing State Journal, 14 January 2004. In 1974, shortly after taking the reins at Ann Arbor's Community High, Brownlee characterized the student body as sixty-percent "high achievers who are politically disenchanted" and forty-percent students who were "academically disenchanted"."Brownlee, Community High dean," Ann Arbor News, 28 June 1973
In October 1973, The Wall Street Journal described Community High's efforts to overcome what CHS counselor Andrades Smith called "widespread and commonly practiced" sexism in the hiring of teachers, career counseling of students, and classroom curricula. As the Journal reported, "Partly as a result of pressure brought by militant feminists both inside and outside the school system, training seminars for teachers were organized earlier this year to explore subtle and overt sex discrimination at Community High." These consciousness-raising workshops, which included talks by female professionals and "role reversals" of traditional sex roles, served as model for a program adopted the following year throughout the Ann Arbor school system.Everett Groseclose, "Sexism & Schools: Feminists and others now attack sex bias in nation's classrooms," The Wall Street Journal, 9 October 1973, p. 1.
In 1975, CHS became the first alternative school in Michigan to receive accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Accreditation officials, according to news reports, were mildly taken aback by the school's eccentricities, questioning the lack of any non-smoking area within the school and some students' practice of bringing their pets to school.Mary Jo Frank, "Community High accredited despite building," Ann Arbor News, 23 April 1975.
Merger with Earthworks
Through the mid-1970s, CHS was not the only alternative high school in Ann Arbor. Earthworks High School, a smaller school with an even more experimental culture, had been founded as "Pioneer II" in 1971. The school was initially an offshoot of Pioneer High School, one of the city's two (at the time) large traditional schools, and it eventually was merged with CHS.
Largely student-driven, the 1971 Earthworks proposal declared that students must be equipped "to function creatively, contributively, responsibly and happily in a world whose central characteristic is radical change," a task at which traditional institutions were allegedly failing. Students and teachers explained that they sought to depart from "the authoritarian model of teaching", where teachers are considered "imparters of knowledge" who are seldom mistaken.Sharon Woodson, "'Free school' stresses 'learning' rather than 'teaching,'" Ann Arbor News, 19 September 1971. The school board approved the project despite a rebuke from the board of Ann Arbor's Roman Catholic St. Thomas School (now Gabriel Richard), which called the plan "discriminatory by giving support to one group looking for alternatives."
Diversity proved one of the main stumbling blocks. Before the program opened, some citizens attacked the school board for not considering minority issues, and in the first year, only five students were of minority background (three African American, and two Asian). Difficulties aside, Earthworks opened in October 1971 with 108 students choosing to attend."Pioneer II starts Monday with 108 students enrolled," Ann Arbor News, 7 October 1971. The school operated in a three-room building at 995 North Maple Road, the former site of Fritz Elementary School, now furnished with rugs and mattresses instead of desks and chairs.